European Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine

Background: Prematurity is a burden on any country for being the leading cause of infant mortality in the world. APGAR score, being a component of the degree of birth asphyxia,  is an important tool to assess the quality of  care used for observing neonatal outcome in the delivery room itself. Vitamin D has important role in decreasing the mortality and morbidity in the neonatal period as it helps in prevention of sepsis and respiratory complications .

Aim of the study: To determine the relationship between serum vitamin D level and APGAR score in premature infants.

Patients and methods: This cohort study was done in Sri Guru Ram Das Hospital, Vallah, Sri Amritsar from April 2021 to July 2022on 82 preterm (< 37 weeks ) neonates admitted to the NICU. Patients were divided into 3 groups based on their serum vitamin D levels : deficient , insufficient and sufficient. APGAR score of these preterm neonates at 1 minute and 5 minute was recorded. Later these were analyzed and relationship between serum vitamin D level and APGAR score at 1 minute and 5 minutes was noted.

Results: The lowest APGAR score at 1 minute (between 0-3 ) belonged to the neonates in the deficient group whereas majority of neonates in the insufficient group and in sufficient group had good APGAR scores (>6) at 1 minute. At 5 minutes, all neonates in the insufficient and sufficient group improved their APGAR scores to >6 and in the deficient group, 23.1 % neonates still had low score (4 to 6 ). Therefore, the relationship between APGAR score and serum vitamin D levels in the neonates was statistically significant with p value of 0.006 for APGAR at 1 minute and p value of <0.001 for APGAR at 5 minutes.

Conclusion: In this study, lower vitamin D levels were associated with lowerAPGAR score at 1 minute and 5 minutes